


Bachelor of Arts

by volti



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M/M, Queerplatonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-04
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-07 16:06:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4269561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volti/pseuds/volti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the model is just as creative as the person behind the sketchbook. Sometimes the subject of all these photos has something they can't capture. An art college AU in which Jean really, definitely, absolutely isn't starting to develop a crush on his TA. Maybe. He thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. FALL III

**Author's Note:**

> Starting fresh! I really want to be able to finish a multi-chapter thing, and I've been sitting on this idea for a while, so here goes! _Hopefully_ I'll be updating this the first Saturday of every month, or every other month. I hope you enjoy the ride ;u;

**Jean**

There was no way this person was Professor Ackerman.

For one thing, the only professors Jean had ever seen wear jeans were the ones who were off to teach painting or sculpting for four hours a week, and even they didn't look remotely fashionable. They always paired their clothes with clogs or polo shirts, sometimes a scarf he was sure the fashion design students wouldn't be caught dead in. And there were always stains and frays in the fabric that reminded him more of carpenters or the work his father used to do around the house--or try to do, until his mother would ask if he was finally going to ask for some professional help. But none of them wore beanies and unlaced boots, and they didn't sit at students' desks, and they definitely weren't certified to teach Japanese at a different school in the consortium.

Though, to be fair, he probably shouldn't have been thinking about that when everyone in the classroom was staring at him. Or maybe they were staring at the drawing tablet that was poking out of his bag, or the way he gripped the strap of his messenger bag like he was a Goddamn freshman instead of three semesters away from graduating.

"Sorry," Jean managed to stammer around the dryness in his throat, glancing at at the clock. (Three minutes past ten--of course he was late.) A few people sitting nearby snickered, and he tried not to glare at them. He probably wouldn't have been able to, not with this stupid tunnel vision he was sporting. "I, uh, got lost."

The person at the front of the room waved him toward an empty seat off to the side. "Just have a seat," they said, and if Jean were anything remotely close to a writer he might have said they sounded like wind chimes. Or maybe not; there was something there, maybe it was the glint in their eye, that gave him the feeling they could suplex anyone who looked at them funny. "He'll be here in a couple of minutes. He's running late."

Jean wondered if Professor Ackerman was the type to blatantly smoke on campus--that was usually why professors at the art school stumbled in late. But this was one of those liberal arts places, where you could actually get decent coffee at a campus cafe and didn't have to travel halfway across town just to go to the library, where there were actually rules that you had to be twenty-five feet away from the doors if you wanted to light up. It seemed too proper for habits like that. Habits like theirs.

He tried not to pay any more mind to it, or to the people that were still staring, and instead caught glimpses of the person at the front of the room in between pulling out his workbook and pencil. They didn't seem particularly interested in anything around them, only twirled a dry-erase marker between pale, slender fingers, blew locks of dark hair out of their eyes every so often, and kept their eyes lowered to the floor amid the hushed and nervous small talk, like they'd done all this before. Maybe they'd failed the class before and were taking it again? But that didn't explain why they were facing the rest of the students, or why they didn't have a workbook in front of them.

Or why they looked so bored with the world.

Maybe school had already sucked the life out of them. He wouldn't put it past them at this point. But then one of the doors at the back of the room flung open, and they and the other students looked up in his direction, and for a second his stomach turned at the sudden focus in their eyes. He wasn't sure whether the look was something of vengeance or some subtle affection, but he busied himself with flipping through his workbook, only daring to steal glances out of the corner of his eye every so often. Until there was Professor Ackerman, a mug of what smelled like tea in his hand, riffling through papers in his satchel and talking with the student at the front of the room in hushed tones. He was... definitely a lot shorter than Jean expected--maybe than everyone else expected, too, if the whispers he overheard were anything to go off. He didn't smell like nicotine or smoke, either; Jean considered that a plus.

Professor Ackerman cleared his throat then, shooting a look at the students behind him through the dark hair that fell over his eyes, and they stiffened almost immediately. For a second, Jean wondered how close Professor Ackerman and this student were. They both looked like they could kill anyone with a stare--maybe they worked together so often and so closely that they traded habits and quirks with one another without even realizing it.

"I expect you're all here for the 101 class," Professor Ackerman finally said, all the wrinkles in his forehead instead of his slacks, like he was going through the motions without caring for much else. Like he was ready to teach at them instead of to them. Not that Jean could blame him--even in a class he wanted to take, he wasn't expecting much today, except resting his chin in his hands the whole time, maybe learning a few lines of hiragana. Maybe studying the professor himself to figure out how to get on his good side, but that would take more than three classes in one week.

Professor Ackerman went on, fishing a marker out of his pocket and scribbling lines of characters on the whiteboard all the while. "I know who you are and why you're here, and you know who I am, so I don't think we need to go through all the damn formalities. Might as well just jump into the language--that's how you learn."

"Um... Professor?" A student on the other side of the room meekly raised their hand and pushed their glasses up the bridge of their nose.

"Don't bother with Professor Ackerman," he said without looking up, too pointed to be anything remotely close to friendly or laid-back. "Levi will do just fine."

The student recoiled--probably a freshman--and Jean actually felt a little bad for them as they ducked behind their open workbook. "Sorry, I--um, who's that?"

"Who?" 

"Her."

The student at the front of the room flinched--just barely, but Jean noticed out of the corner of his eye--and the marker between their fingers tumbled to the floor and rolled away. Swallowing, he gently kicked it back in their direction, and he could have sworn there was gratitude in their silence as they picked it up again.

Levi wrote a few more characters on the board, capped his marker, and dropped it on the metal rail with a clang that Jean felt in the pit of his stomach. "They," he began as he rounded on the class, a correction for the masses, "are Mikasa. They will be your TA and oral group leader. If you've read the syllabus, you'll know that once a week, you are to meet with them in groups to practice your speaking skills. They'll be passing around a timetable now; mark where you're available and pass it along. And for the love of God, don't waste your time with it. There are only so many minutes in this class."

"Mikasa," another student said, probably some snooty history major who thought East Asia was "fascinating" and "exotic," as Mikasa passed around a blank chart and a pen. Like the whole class was testing the name on their tongues in the spaces between conversation and scrawls of black ink. "Isn't that the name of a battleship or something?"

"Is that important right now?" Mikasa asked without the slightest change in their expression, and Jean couldn't help but grin down at the blank practice squares in his workbook as Levi picked up where he left off. There was the suplex.

\---

Levi wasn't entirely a terrible teacher, and Japanese wasn't a terrible class. Jean had certainly had worse; the C's from high-school Spanish could attest to that. He could at least handle crossing streets and breezy, structured campuses for a teacher who was just as methodical. And he could definitely handle a teacher who sat on tables and flipped markers while he spoke and dusted off his clothes, like everything about him said "Fuck the system" in the most subtle and proper way possible. The whole first class had probably been some intimidation tactic, something that said, "If you can't handle this, you probably shouldn't be here."

Apparently they all could, though, because no one had dropped the course; Jean noticed Mikasa quietly taking headcounts for the first few classes, murmuring the same number in Japanese to Levi every time with a hint of a smile on their lips. Maybe it was all just a matter of pride, or proving themselves. Or maybe Mikasa was worth staying for; he saw how his classmates did a piss-poor job of stealing glances at them and an even poorer job of using the right pronouns.

For all his stiffness, Levi actually made sure they knew what they were talking about before they moved on to another topic. He spent the right amount of time with everything, went round-robin with grammar structures, even if they couldn't come up with the most creative sentences on the spot. "I couldn't care less about the substance," Levi told them in the first couple of weeks. "You could tell me that the president is from Australia and eats shit for lunch. As long as you know how to say it."

And then some smart-ass said exactly that, shit and all, and Mikasa had to stifle a laugh behind their notebook. And Jean smiled down at his desk and knew exactly who his next sentence would be about.

Maybe it was stupid of him, but he found himself looking forward to the first oral group meeting, even tried to find the classroom on his own once so he wouldn't get lost again. (There'd been an economics lecture in there, and he didn't want to know how red his cheeks were as he apologized his way out.) And he probably wasn't the only one to slump back against the door in relief when he walked in and noticed Levi was nowhere to be found.

"That happens a lot," Mikasa told him with their wind-chime voice, gesturing toward a chair in the mostly-empty classroom. "Seems you're getting used to the campus."

Jean turned pink and dropped his bag, rubbing the rest of the weight of his shoulders and pulling out his textbook. "Learned my lesson," he mumbled, wondering if he'd ever be able to stamp the first class from his memory. Or theirs.

"Evidently. We'll start when the others straggle in."

He couldn't help but wonder if they were a writer, from the way they carried themselves, flipped through books and notebooks and spoke in simple convolutions. Maybe they were an English major with only enough time on their hands to scribble down makeshift lesson plans and bite their nails down to the quick. Even still, Mikasa was surprisingly patient when left in charge, for all their resemblances to Levi, and for all the time they probably spent together outside of class. Mikasa stuck to round-robins, taught them to keep conversation, went through the motions of pronunciation and fluidity with the students who needed it. "It's the second-fastest spoken language," they said. "You'll have to learn to speak fast if you want to speak it at all."

They always talked like that, a strange mix of pressure and encouragement, and sometimes Jean thought about asking if they ever noticed that they was some unsettling carbon copy of their professor, thought about how he would even bring that up in the first place, or when--no one ever saw Mikasa anywhere outside of class and group meetings.

And then Mikasa would pull him out of all his wondering and thinking and tell him to make sentences of the school supplies, the flags, the characters they'd made up and drawn on the whiteboard. And he'd collect himself and learn all over again while they reminded everyone of their homework assignments, especially the half-page autobiography due in Levi's inbox after the third week of classes.

For a moment, Jean let himself simmer in the thought of Mikasa's wind-chime thank yous and the brush of their fingers against the corner of his notebook before he mentally slapped himself. He wasn't here to rely on someone else, he told himself. Thank God.

\---

He didn't know why his hands were shaking. It was just an assignment. Granted, one he'd worked on while video chatting with Marco at the same time--because he needed a sounding board, he'd said, and Marco didn't particularly mind it--but an assignment all the same. Half a page. As careful as he could possibly make it, in spite of Marco's encouragement to tackle more difficult sentence structures.

"I don't want to risk it," he'd said.

"You don't want to risk anything," Marco had replied around mouthfuls of crackers and hummus. They didn't need to say anything else.

But as Jean passed the office doors in the Modern Language department, he couldn't kick the overwhelming feeling that he didn't belong here. Three weeks, and he still felt like this about this school--like it was too good for him, like he still had to fight tooth and nail because the name of his own was the butt of too many jokes. The stares of the students he passed didn't particularly help, and he tried to shrug it off with a clenched fist and narrowed eyes, occasionally looking down at the essay in his hand. Levi probably wouldn't make the situation any better; he'd probably pluck the paper from Jean's hands, and Jean would already be halfway out of the office before he could see what kind of judgmental look Levi would give his sentences. Yeah. Real fucking comfortable.

But when he reached Levi's office, an open maroon door with a plastic placard that read 235A, and peeked inside, he found Mikasa sitting at the desk instead, poring over a couple sheets of paper and envelopes. A bulky digital camera sat beside them on the table, and he thought he could see an even bulkier black bag poking out from behind the desk.

Well. That wasn't part of the script. Now he'd have to sit at the end of the hall and make up a whole new plan.

Or he could risk it.

With the paper in his hand and his stomach turning over and over, he took a deep breath and knocked, mumbling a greeting in Japanese. If he was going to risk it, he might as well play himself up a bit.

Mikasa looked up from their work at the second knock and placed their folders on the desk; when Jean looked a little closer, he noticed that they were a series of small, glossy photographs, though he was too far to see what was in them. "Turning in your essay?" they asked.

Stiffening, he snapped to attention. "Oh--uh, yeah. Sorry, I thought... Levi was going to be here?"

"He had an emergency at home, so he called me in to take them." They busied themselves with flipping open an empty manila folder. "Just put it in here, I'll give it to him later this afternoon. You're the first one to come in today." They shrugged. "I wouldn't be surprised if everyone else was just starting it now."

Jean let out a nervous laugh, hands curling around the strap of his bag for their usual security once he'd handed the assignment over. "I, uh, did it last night so I wouldn't have to worry about that."

Mikasa closed the folder without looking at his essay, and admittedly the tremble in his hands went with it. "Smart. Did you need anything else?"

He swallowed, scuffing his heel against the carpet, and nodded, then quickly shook his head. "I mean, I don't, I just. Um." Maybe he should have stayed at the end of the hall, rehearsed the here you gos and thank yous and have a nice weekends so he wouldn't be standing here, choking like an idiot. "So you and Levi seem pretty... close?"

Of all the fucking things to say, it had to be that.

Mikasa shrugged. "Yeah. We are."

He rubbed the back of his neck and looked anywhere but at them. "Are you two... y'know..."

They snorted and rested their head in their hands, and Jean knew he'd go back to his dorm and tell Marco that taking risks was a load of bullshit. He couldn't even tell if they were laughing or ready to kick him out of the office. Not that he'd blame them--he'd definitely overstayed his welcome by now. "Every year. Every year someone asks if we're dating." Slowly, they lifted their head to look at him again, and from the light in their eyes he could tell that maybe it wasn't as uncomfortable as he thought. "We're cousins."

Jean paled. "Oh--shit, sorry, I--"

"You're not the first one. No harm. Anything else you need, besides prying into my supposed love life?"

"I didn't know you were a photographer," he finally blurted out, and the ensuing silence made him almost want to sink into the ground.

Almost, because Mikasa's eyes lit up again as they drifted between him and the photographs on the desk. "I am," they said after a moment, gently pushing them in his direction; when he took a closer look, he noticed the array of brightly-colored leaves, the occasional grayscale shot, people he didn't recognize in precariously casual poses.

"You should really consider going to school for this," he managed, still eyeing the photos from a distance, still afraid that he might ruin them with a single fingerprint. Anything was better than that choking silence. "You could really make something of yourself with these."

Mikasa raised a brow. "I do."

It took Jean a moment to put two and two together, and his mouth fell open. "But you--I thought you--"

They shrugged, resting their chin in their hands. "You're not the first person to think that, either." And then, as he was struggling to right himself and back out of the office, "Maybe you should keep your eyes a little more open on your own campus."

"Right," he muttered, nearly bumping into one of his classmates as he speedwalked down the carpeted hall, as far away as he could get himself, clenching and unclenching his fists all the while.

That, Jean reminded himself, was why it was hardly ever worth it to go off the script. But maybe he was a little more alive for it. Marco would probably say so.

\---

It was like he saw Mikasa almost everywhere in the weeks after that, like maybe he'd taken their advice a little too close to heart. It wasn't like he meant it, it just... happened like that. Fate was probably too strong a word for a couple of artistic twenty-somethings, but he couldn't bring himself to call it just a long string of coincidences, either. Sometimes he would see them on the streets with their camera bag slung over their shoulder, walking to or from the main building of their school-- _their_ school, he had to remind himself, because he couldn't bring himself to distance them anymore. Sometimes he'd catch their eye in the dining hall, him with a French fry pinched between his fingers, them fiddling absently with the cardboard sleeve of a coffee cup or exchanging words he couldn't hear with a couple of other students. Their friends, probably--of course they had friends. Everybody had friends.

Occasionally he would see them meander across the residence campus, remind himself not to look for too long because he didn't come out to stare, he came to unwind; the sketchbook in his hands should have been enough evidence of that. Or maybe it wasn't--maybe it was an excuse. Not that either of them made moves to speak to each other. There was always a weirdly silent acknowledgment between them, like they never needed anything else. Like all they wanted was to know the other person was there. Knew how to exist somewhere outside the confines of a school that was only partly theirs.

He supposed that was all he really needed, outside of the silent exchanges of papers in class, when he scanned the few corrections they made in purple pen. He didn't need scripts because there was nothing else to say outside of _hello_ s under their breaths and the cookie-cutter sentences he constructed in a different language, and sometimes he stumbled even over those. But Mikasa would help him, word by word or letter by letter, and that was enough to stoke some kind of flame in the pit of his stomach.

"It's nothing," he told Marco the night before Parents' Weekend in early October. "Honest. It's just class, and they're just Mikasa."

"Okay," Marco replied with a lilt in his voice, the kind that asked if he really thought he was fooling anyone. Marco was wrong once, though--he could be wrong again.

But Jean didn't really have the time to think about the tone in Marco's voice or whether he was actually wrong by the time his mother strolled onto campus, when they caught up in French and never wanted for words.

And of course, he saw Mikasa then, fit into place like they happened to fit anywhere else. Before he could say anything or even twitch in their direction, they froze, eyes wide, and fled the other way, toward a boy with blonde hair who caught their arm. He looked like he might have been consoling them when they walked off the residence campus; Jean felt his heart sink, though he couldn't figure out exactly why.

"Who was that?" his mother asked.

"Just someone from class," he mumbled. He could wonder about that some other time.

("That was Armin," they told him on the way out of class Monday morning, the most words they'd exchanged since he met them in Levi's office. "Our parents are too far away for them to come visit, so we spend the weekend together. It's been like that since freshman year."

"It looked like you were running away from me," he said, in another weak attempt to go off-script.

"Why does that matter?" they asked, with slender fingers wrapped around the warmth of their coffee cup, and Jean couldn't do more than open and close his mouth several times.

Suplex.

But he figured he could recover from that, at least.)

Sometimes, after that, their conversations would move beyond the contained "Well done!" at the top of his homework assignments, or the quiet hellos and thank yous whenever they happened to meet. It never felt particularly risky to him; everything was pace-by-pace, instead of the worn-out _talking to someone you like is like jumping into an ice-cold pool_ metaphor his mother used to recite. He'd wave from a few tables away in the cafeteria; they'd pass by the animation lab, probably on their way to the dark room, and peek inside until they caught his eye; he'd try, really try, to carry a conversation in Japanese in the five minutes they walked side-by-side to Levi's classroom; they'd stare a little too long at the sketchbook in his hand when they crossed his path on the residential campus.

And then Mikasa bit in the middle of November. Which Jean, to be honest, didn't really expect. He figured he'd have to rehearse in his head again, to offer something more meaningful than a poor showcase of skill. But when they kneeled next to him under the oak tree outside his dorm hall and asked what he was constantly working on so seriously, he couldn't help but blurt out the truth.

"References."

Mikasa gave him a blank look as their bag slid off their shoulder and dropped to the fresh mulch, and their beanie almost fluttered down with it before they tugged it over their ears. "References."

His pencil tumbled to the grass, and he reached up to rub the back of his neck. A nervous habit. He wondered if Mikasa would pick up on it if they stuck around long enough. "Yeah, references. For my animation project. For posture and movement, things like that. It's... kind of hard when everyone's always on the move, you have to. I don't know. Picture it in your head sometimes. Like you have to have a photographic memory--"

"Eidetic."

"What?"

"It's called eidetic memory." Mikasa settled on the grass, clapping the dirt off their jeans, and fished their camera out of their bag. "But I can see why people call it that instead. Easier word to remember." They fiddled with lenses and buttons that he couldn't distinguish, lashes kissing their cheekbones, fingers curled too carefully and lips curved in a pleasantly absent smile, until they lifted the camera and snapped a picture before he could say anything else. "But it's immediate, too," they went on, turning the camera to face him with his own candidness--dilated pupils, the faint rush of blood at the height of his cheekbones, the slight O of his lips. "Vivid. Everything happens in one moment. One impression."

In the haze of their words, Jean almost forgot to look for his pencil, and he fumbled among the blades of grass to pick it up again. "Isn't that... kind of a shame?"

"Why?"

He swallowed, tried to collect himself all over again. "Well, because... I dunno, you're relying on _just_ one impression. You never get to see it twice in your memory. But every time you look a picture, even if it's the same picture, you always notice something new. Like the color of something, or a facial expression, or..." He shrugged, sketching the finer points of the crouching figure under his hands. "Like I said, I don't know. It's not exactly what I'm studying."

For once, Mikasa seemingly had nothing to shoot back, and the silence was almost suffocating, made Jean think he'd said the wrong thing. But they turned the camera over in their hands, with the same cautious grip, and their eyes drifted over the workmanship and the screen before they spoke again, softly. "You're not wrong. Well, you are, but you're not."

Jean stopped sketching. "So which is it?"

Mikasa shrugged, tucking the camera away again. "You're not wrong about pictures. But you're wrong about what you study."

He snorted. "Right, I forgot I'm the pasty Jewish kid who tries to speak Japanese, too."

"I meant you study change." They folded their legs in toward their chest, tugging on the tails of their flannel with the sleeves spilling over their knuckles. "And differences. Because everything's moving. You have to notice every detail before everybody else, right? Sometimes you have to make it subtle, or obvious. You look at every little thing, so of course you'd say something like that."

If it were anyone else speaking, he might have sneered and walked away. But there was something so genuine about the growing softness in their eyes when they looked up at him, and the cross of their ankles in their untied boots, that he couldn't help but lock into place. Listen to each word to make it mean something. Because they weren't wrong, either.

"Can I draw you?" he asked before he could stop himself.

Risk.

Mikasa's eyes narrowed, and his pencil trembled in his grip. "What?" they said.

"I, uh." He scrambled to find words in the little time he had, silently hoping for Mikasa's mercy instead of a bladed tongue. "I could use more references, you know? Especially a stationary one. So I don't have to just rely on memory." His teeth sank into his lip before he went on. "And, you know, in exchange I could be a subject for some of your photos. For a portfolio, right? So it... goes two ways?"

Risk.

"Why?" they asked again without moving, and the look in their eyes began to freeze him instead.

He rubbed the back of his neck again to break it. "Well, I mean, you have a lot of insight on things like this, and you seem nice--"

"Seem?"

" _Are!_ " His face dropped to his open palms. "Are, shit, sorry. I just meant it because we barely know each other, which probably makes you want to say no right off the bat. And I don't blame you. But we just." He cleared his throat to slow himself down, pushing away the thought of Marco laughing at him later on, in that harmless way of his. "We keep bumping into each other. And maybe this is all just a big excuse to get to know you better and spend more time with you and I might as well have just said so--"

Mikasa put up a hand to stop him. "Enough. I get it."

Jean's face fell for a moment, and he tried to cover it up with a bout of hollow laughter. "Yeah, no, I get it. Forget I said anything, we can--"

"I'll do it."

"What?"

They shrugged, slinging their bag over their shoulder again. "You've got a deal."

He could feel his stomach turn under their words, and he ran his fingers through his hair and snapped his sketchbook shut. "Because you pity me?"

Mikasa scoffed in that way that eerily reminded him of Levi, and he tried to stamp the resemblance from his memory. "Your speaking skills, maybe. But you need a reference, and I need more subjects, and I could always do with mutual benefits--why are you laughing?"

Jean tucked his sketchbook under his arm as he got to his feet, still smiling when he lifted his eyes to meet theirs and reached to shake their hand. "Because I think I kind of pity you too."


	2. WINTER III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the second installment of BoA c: and thank you so much for almost 200 hits! I'm really grateful for all of them, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story!

**Mikasa**

A week later, Mikasa still hadn't deleted the photo of Jean from their camera. They didn't have a reason to. They just didn't have a reason _not_ to, either. It was just sort of there every time they got back to work and turned it on, and Jean was right. About one thing, anyway. There was always something new to notice in the photograph, even on such a small screen. Once it was the wayward leaf on his lap; another time it was the curve of his eyebrow just as he processed what they were doing; and then it was the remnants of charcoal on his fingers, clawed so they wouldn't smudge his paper.

One thing it hadn't captured--and probably couldn't, the more they thought about it--was what he meant when he said he pitied them, too. And why he said it with a smile, like it was some kind of sick joke. What could he possibly pity when he barely knew the first thing about them, and said so himself? Not that they would put it past him to be some kind of wise; he didn't put it past them, after all.

"You're worried about something," Eren murmured from his place on their bed the Tuesday before Thanksgiving break, and when they sat up straight and tossed him a glance, he only cracked a smile and leaned over to thumb away the knot in their brow. "You're thinking too hard again. Take a break, would you? You're getting that weird hunch in your back again and it's not even finals week."

Mikasa heaved a sigh, fiddling with USB cords and clicking through the photos on their laptop screen. "And you're awfully laid-back for someone who's got a date in two hours."

"It's the diner with Armin. Not like it's our first, either." Eren rolled onto his elbows, peering at the computer, still grinning. “Hey, who’s that?”

And of course fate, or whatever it was, would have them stop at the picture of Jean, all blown up for them to notice even more details the umpteenth time around. “Someone from Levi’s class,” they muttered. “We just talked, that’s all.” Talked? Are talking? They fumbled with the words like they fumbled with their fingers, stealing glances at Eren every so often in the hopes that he wouldn’t make a big deal of it all. Them talking to someone who wasn’t him or Armin. He was always trying to do that, get them out there because they had “so much to offer other people” and because they could use “someone else who could keep up with them.” They never asked if it was because he wanted space. They didn’t think they had to.

“Wait a minute,” Eren said, eyes wide as he sat up. “Isn’t that Jean Kirschtein? Isn’t he in animation?”

Mikasa’s brows furrowed again, out of his reach. “How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “Glassmakers can appreciate some animation, too, you know. Unless you’ve already forgotten about Saturday mornings. Besides, he had some project or other entered in the school’s film festival last year. I think it won an award or something?” His legs dangled off the edge of the bed, and Mikasa turned back to the computer, crossing and uncrossing their legs at the look in Jean’s eyes, like he was still scrutinizing them without actually looking at them. “You didn’t know that?”

“I like to stay in my lane,” Mikasa replied with a noncommittal shrug.

Eren snorted. “Of course.”

In the silence that followed, Mikasa leaned back in their chair and let their eyes fall shut, and Jean’s words started to repeat themselves in their head. _You always notice something new, can I draw you, it goes two ways, because I pity you too,_ all punctuated with every new detail they picked up from the photograph. And then all the words they expected Eren to say, the _finally_ s and the _I told you so_ s and the exaggerated sighs of relief.

But Eren didn’t say anything, except, “So what’re you gonna do with that picture?”

With a sigh, they snapped back to attention, back to the face staring at them with more surprise and candor than they could stomach. “I don’t know yet,” they finally replied. “I’ll figure it out eventually.”

“Like most things.”

“Yeah. Like most things.”

Eren got to his feet, clicking to a different smile; he had a softer smile on his face when Mikasa looked up at him, and he reached over to tousle their hair. “If you look at it too long, your eyes are going to go all crossed. How am I supposed to explain that one to Mom?”

This time Mikasa was the one to scoff. “Auntie is your first concern? Not whether I’ll be able to be a photographer with crossed eyes?”

He was at the door now, tugging his scarf off the hook and slinging his bag onto his shoulder. “You think crossed eyes are going to stop _you_?” He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the door, and they’d swear he got that from his dad; they could see the outline of Uncle Grisha in him, distant but subtly doting. they never did get used to calling them “mom” and “dad”; they didn’t think they wanted to. “I mean it. Take a break and do something else. You said it yourself, you’ll figure it out.”

They sat there, arms limp in their lap, and looked after Eren as he left, the silent promise to call when he was safe in his dorm room hanging between them and lingering in his footsteps. The landscape of the waterfront nearby, all waves and the industry of office buildings, stared back at them when they swiveled around in their chair. All the lifeless silence of almost abstract things. And with a heavy breath, they finally shut their laptop.

Mikasa printed the picture of Jean in the lab that evening. To study their subject, they told themselves as they coaxed the glossy paper from the tray and into their open palms. They’d have to, wouldn’t they, to know how they’d like to see him. The kind of air he could carry, where he could fit in.

Jean’s lips were chapped, they noticed this time, before they tucked the photo away.

\---

The first time they met for their deal, it was the end of November, and Jean laughed and rolled his eyes when Mikasa reached out to shake his hand. “That’s what I meant,” he said, taking them by the wrist instead. His grip was gentle, and a bit clammy, as if everything in him was asking permission for everything he did around them. Still, they couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t as jittery as before. His eyes even gleamed when he helped them assume a position for him to draw, and he patted their camera bag and kept it close, like it was his own to protect.

“What do you mean, that’s what you meant?” they asked with narrowed eyes, and Jean shook his head and waved the question away as he flipped open his sketchbook and started to draw. His head bobbed between them and the paper, and sometimes he would stare a little too long before snapping to attention again. Maybe he was still getting used to the idea that they weren’t going anywhere, that he didn’t have to commit every piece of them to memory.

“It’s too late in the term for this to be your final project, isn’t it?” they asked to break the silence with more than the scratches of his pencil and the occasional cough. “Or is Japanese the only subject you don’t procrastinate in?”

“Degree project,” he told them; out of the corner of their eye they could see that he was squinting, and his bottom lip was caught between his teeth. For a moment, they wondered how many habits he was made of. “I took summer classes, so I’m graduating a semester early.”

“Same boat. Sort of.” Mikasa hummed, eyes slipping in and out of focus as they stared across the residence campus. Their limbs locked into place, and they felt the need to wrap their arms around themselves, do anything to close up again. It pulsed under their skin, alongside their blood--maybe even as a part of it. But a deal was a deal, and they could already hear Eren telling them that it would be good for them in the end. “I started first year with credits from high school.”

Jean sighed, and it sounded like a laugh he was trying to conceal. “An overachiever, huh?”

Mikasa fought the urge to shrug. “I had to. It felt like it.”

He nodded after a pause, like maybe he felt guilty for asking in the first place--the only part of him that seemed close to the way he’d been before--and they surrendered to the silence of the campus again. Sometimes they picked up the conversations of passersby, sometimes they tuned in to the whisper of the breeze or the long strokes of Jean’s pencil. He switched between hurrying and taking his time, like it was something to get used to. Like _they_ were something to get used to. 

And when they switched, Mikasa found themselves doing the same, though they didn’t speak any more than was necessary. They studied him, weighing the camera in their hand, and fit him into the world around them. Armin told them once that their photographs were like that, like jigsaw puzzles. They were always trying to fit everything together so that even a single photo was a collage, so that every element stood out somehow. He said it was especially like that whenever they took pictures of people. That they demanded so much attention that it sometimes seemed like they were out of place.

“I’m not used to taking pictures of people,” they’d told him one night when they were sophomores, full on takeout and too many movies. “You know that.”

“I know you’re not used to people, either,” Armin replied with a piece of pizza crust pinched between his fingers.

Jean was clearing his throat now, and Mikasa realized they were staring. They apologized under their breath, snapped a few more pictures, and set the camera aside. It had been a couple of hours, they noticed when they glanced at their watch.

Jean didn’t say anything for a while, only took his sketchbook back and flipped through a few pages of it, showing them how he’d drawn them. “It’s... uh. Easier with software,” he admitted. “But references still help. Gotta get that anatomy right and all, you know? Or, um, maybe you don’t know, I--”

“I know some things,” they said, taking a seat next to him and flipping through the pictures on the camera’s display screen. Somehow it was more comfortable listening to him act the way he had before. Like he wasn’t quite used to them just yet. “Proportions, and things like that. My partner--Armin, you remember him--he’s in the architect program. Same math, different subject.”

Jean’s face fell a bit, and Mikasa pretended not to notice. “Partner?”

“Platonic. He’s a platonic partner.”

“Oh.” Jean bit his lip again. “That’s cool.”

“Why don’t you ever ask questions?” they finally blurted out.

His brows furrowed, eerily similar to theirs. “What do you mean, ask questions?”

“About. About me.” Mikasa set the camera in their lap for fear of dropping it, and their hands balled into fists. “Pronouns, and platonic partners. Everyone asks about that.”

“Do you _want_ me to ask about that?”

“Not really.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“I know it’s none of your business.”

“Is that why you’re so quiet all the time?”

Mikasa looked up at him; they’d never seen him so serious before. He was always struggling with something, getting sentences right no matter what the language. He looked like that was least of his concerns now, with the sunlight in his eyes and the hard line of his mouth and the way his fingers curled tight, tight around the spirals of his sketchbook. “Because people treat you like a novelty, so it’s only worth keeping close to the people you’ve had for a long time?”

They grit their teeth at how quickly he hit the nail on the head, or maybe how slowly. Who knows what he could have been thinking about all those classes. “I have to go,” they said, gathering up their things, getting to their feet, clapping the dirt from their jeans a little too harshly. “Thanks. For the pictures.”

Jean opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. “Okay. Keep me posted. About, uh. This.”

“Yeah.” They didn’t know if they’d come back. If the two of them would go back to class pretending this had never happened, or wanting to forget that it had. Instead they gripped the strap of their bag and turned on their heel to leave. “This.”

\---

Mikasa did go back, and it wasn’t because of what Eren could have said. It was because of what Armin did say. _You can’t keep closing up every time someone wants to get to know you, or whenever you think someone is too close to_ you. He said it in between bites of Caesar salad and his spare hand covering theirs, like he’d been wanting to say it for a long time. Like maybe he’d rehearsed it over and over in his head in case he thought they’d get mad. Like.

Like a script.

Mikasa’s heart sank, and they couldn’t tell him he was wrong.

Jean was smiling with his ankles crossed when they met up at the train station a few days later. “Glad you could make it,” he said, as if he thought they really wouldn’t.

It fell together like that. They did. With cameras and film, pencils and paper, the chill of the coming winter, the small talk in between and just outside of class. They spoke about what they had to at first, language and angles and placement and just how they should purse their lips when they said the word “who.” Until one day, when they were sitting on the stone ledge outside the main building and Jean was tapping his pencil against the corner of his paper, and he said, “It’s cause you see everything as business. Things that have to get done so you can wash yourself of people you don’t really care about. That’s what I meant before.”

“Business,” Mikasa repeated, and Jean blinked.

“Are you gonna wash yourself of me too?” His brows were furrowed again, and his fingers were coiled too tightly around his pencil.

Their teeth sank into their lip, and they lowered their gaze to the frost on the sidewalk. “I don’t know.”

Jean sighed. “Better than a no, I guess. Hey, don’t--” He leaned forward, with his fingers curled under their chin, and tipped their head up to look at him. Light pink dusted the tops of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, and they couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or, perhaps, for the same reason their stomach clenched. “Don’t... do that.” He paused, smoothing out their bottom lip with his thumb, and Mikasa tried to count the seconds with their pulse and the footsteps of passing students. “For the--the sketch, I mean.”

“Oh.” They leaned back and looked out across the street, fingers brushing where his had been; their stomach clenched again. “Right. Sorry.”

Sometimes they twiddled their thumbs and tried to ask other questions, with the camera in their hands or with the different posts he asked of them. What his favorite color was, what he wanted to do when he got out of here, if he was seeing anybody. The things they had in common, and the things they didn’t. He answered them all with different shades of grins and told them about the color of the ocean, working at a startup and climbing the ladder, and Marco. An old friend he never fell out of touch with, never really wanted to. They talked on ledges and in libraries, with the camera in their hands, or the charcoal stains on his; he tried to wipe them off once, but they told him, crouched behind the viewfinder, that they gave him character. That photos weren’t always made of cleanliness and soft lighting and paper stars.

“You like to take pictures of what’s real,” he said. And then, “Uh, what are you staring at?”

“Nothing,” said Mikasa, perhaps too quickly, and they dropped their gaze and snapped the picture.

They caught him staring, too, here and there. Sometimes his eyes lingered on the curve of their fingers because hands were always too difficult to draw, or on their eyes when he asked them to tell him about their first camera. Sometimes he looked when he didn’t even have his sketchbook in front of him, when they sat in the corner of the liberal arts school’s cafe before class. Like maybe he was still trying to capture them, all of them, in spite of all the lectures about how art can “never really capture life, only imitate it.” He rolled his eyes and made air quotes with his fingers the first time he brought that up, and Mikasa couldn’t help but stifle a laugh, because how could they possibly take him seriously with all that cappuccino foam on his lip?

And then Jean laughed too, and wiped his mouth, and for a disconcerting moment Mikasa wished they could have done it themselves.

Armin and Eren never said anything when Mikasa talked to them about Jean and the drawings and the photographs. They figured at least Armin would have pointed out how they used their hands to speak more often, or that Eren might have smiled and said _I told you so_ , or even that they might have sighed and talked about “young love” regardless of whether any of them thought it was any kind of love. But they only listened, Armin settled in Eren’s lap with papers and blueprints scattered around them, until Eren reminded them that finals were coming, and what would they do after that?

“I don’t know,” Mikasa finally said, righting some assignments that Levi had asked them to grade and all but throwing their pen aside. “Something.”

Eren and Armin looked at each other, then back at Mikasa. “Something,” they said, as if they already knew what it was.

\---

They figured Jean would probably want to see less of him in the week before reviews. Because everyone had work to do whether they’d been procrastinating or not, and Levi was giving a final exam with an oral section besides. But he caught them on the way to the darkroom and asked if he could tag along--”We can practice speaking, maybe,” he said--and that was enough to reel Mikasa in. He caught onto how they worked soon enough anyway, the silence and the processing, chemicals, finishing, spotting, and barely said anything. They could feel the drift of his gaze between their hands, and the sink, and the rest of the equipment, and they stared back at him while fiddling with one of the timers.

“You don’t have to stay totally quiet, you know,” they said. “I can concentrate.”

“I know,” Jean mumbled. “I just. Didn’t realize how much you had to put into all this? Uh, I mean, in a good way,” he added with an uncomfortable cough. “Not that this is supposed to be easy, or anything.”

Mikasa shrugged. “I know what you meant.”

They talked in between photos, sometimes in simple Japanese, sometimes not, while Mikasa flipped through papers and rummaged around for clothespins. Jean kept his mouth shut when they turned to the chemicals, as if any word might disturb the process, but he watched carefully, as if everything about him relied on noticing, sight. And Mikasa’s stomach turned for want of things to say, because he could say enough with the gentle bump of his shoulder against theirs, or the way he stiffened when they turned to look at him, too close to do anything else. Or perhaps not close enough. 

In the dimness of the red light they couldn’t quite tell if he was blushing, or what they would have done if not for the timer going off. But Jean cleared his throat and turned away with a low, “You should probably get that,” and Mikasa took an extra moment to snap out of their haze, wondering if maybe he was looking at their lips, too.

They promised a visit to his neck of the woods, too, and two nights before reviews began they found him in the animation lab at one in the morning, hunched over at one of the computers and surrounded by papers. Because he said he worked better there, he told them once--it was like his library. They took a seat at the swivel chair next to him and slid him a cup of coffee from the twenty-four hour cafe on the residence campus, and he looked at them the way he might have if they were in a cozy apartment on a Sunday morning. Lazy, comfortable, grateful, like he was used to them by now and didn’t want the feeling to go away. 

He talked more in between sips--about animating, the references, an offhand comment about how they were accidentally wearing the same flannel shirt--because computers could undo processes in ways Mikasa’s chemicals couldn’t. And he didn’t seem to flinch when their eyelids grew heavy and they leaned against his side, but he was laughing about something. He was always laughing about something. Maybe they’d spoken their thoughts aloud, about how people might think they were dating because of their shirts, or maybe their hat had fallen to the floor. 

They didn’t quite know when they fell asleep, but they could have sworn they heard him say, “I’m gonna miss you over break.” If they’d slept long enough, and if they’d seen him in a dream, they might have told him the same thing, tugging at the tails of their shirt and teetering on the sides of their worn-out boots as they stood. But Jean was nudging them awake--too fast, too soon--and when they blinked between his half-open eyes and the analog clock on the wall, they realized it was almost half-past three.

“Mikasa? Hey, Mikasa.” Even with bleary eyes they could see he was giving them a smile, endearing instead of nervous, and they only caught bits and pieces of his sentences. “Go on to... I’m... walk you back?”

“I’ll stay,” they mumbled, and they whined and buried their face in their arms.

Jean stifled a laugh. “Mikasa”--and they were more awake now, because no one had ever laughed their name like that before. “I said I’m all done for the night. I’ll take you back.”

“ _Carry me,_ ” they slurred in Japanese; for a second their heart might have skipped, and they half-hoped he hadn’t understood them, or at least that the flannel had muffled their words. But they heard a few clicks of the mouse, the crinkle of a trash bag, the rustle of Jean helping them into their coat and sliding into his own, and when they opened their eyes again he was crouched in front of them, messenger bag slung across their back and their hat in his hand.

“What’re you doing?” they asked.

“You said to carry you,” he said, in the way people talked about the weather or an article they’d read in the newspaper. “So, get on.”

He didn’t complain once, with his arms hooked under their knees and theirs fast around his neck. He scuffed his way through the early December snowfall, occasionally asking if they were warm enough, and thanked them for the groggy vote of confidence when they told him he’d easily pass Levi’s exam. “Too much work, you put in too much work,” they said, even when they fished their dorm key from their coat pocket and shuffled inside.

“No such thing as too much work,” Jean said with a weak smile, tugging their hat back onto their head and brushing their bangs away with icy, shaky fingers. “Get some sleep. I’ll see you Tuesday morning.” And with a nod from them and a bump of the hands from him, they closed the door and collapsed at the foot of their bed.

Mikasa woke up the next morning, still in their flannel and jeans, to search results on their smartphone for “how fast do people fall in almost love,” and with a couple of swipes of the thumb, they could pretend it never happened.

\---

And then finals and reviews happened, but finals and reviews were finals and reviews. They wrung their hands sometimes, tossed their nerves to the wind the rest of the time, and busied themselves in the slot of time that they had to proctor Levi’s exam on an empty stomach. They crossed their ankles and cracked a book open, occasionally stealing glances at the students, answering questions in a whisper, and dropping quiet _thank you_ s when they brought their exams to the front. Some of the students--the ones who still sometimes called them “she,” they noticed--offered the same smiles they’d given Mikasa all semester, like they expected to be on their good side for some reason or another. Others scurried out of the classroom as though they were afraid of them or, perhaps, the paper they’d just handed in.

When Jean finally stood and made his way to the front, he scuffed his heel against the carpet and pushed his exam toward them, along with a granola bar. “ _Please eat this,_ ” he mumbled, giving the bar another nudge, and Mikasa looked up at them with a small smile. And then, “See you next semester,” as he shouldered his bag and smiled back.

They hoped it looked like nothing to the other students. Just an exchange between student and assistant. They also hoped they didn’t look too excited when they replied, “See you then.”

“And so what if you did?” Eren asked later, when they were helping him and Armin pack. There were clothes and cables strewn across the bed and on the floor, and Mikasa cursed as they stepped on the prongs of the plug of a power strip and kicked it aside. “What are you afraid of? Friends? People knowing you have feelings?”

Mikasa frowned and rubbed the sole of their foot. “Exactly,” they said under their breath.

“You haven’t seemed so afraid since you started spending time with Jean, you know,” Armin pointed out, perched atop a suitcase as if willing it shut. “That, or you’ve become incredibly good at acting, or at peace with. Well. Your Resting Stone Face.”

“Is that what it’s called,” Mikasa said flatly, barely making it a question as they focused on folding the nearest pile of clothes. “Well. Having to stay still for hours at a time would do that to you, wouldn’t it.”

And they might have gotten away with it too, if they hadn’t felt their phone vibrate in their back pocket--and then a second time, and a couple more soon after--and if Eren and Armin hadn’t heard it too.

**From: Jean [animator]  
** At: 5:53pm  
_uh, see you next semester, mikasa_

**From: Jean [animator]  
** At: 5:53pm  
_i know i said it already i just  
wanted to say it again i guess?_

**From: Jean [animator]  
** At: 5:56pm  
_also um_  
i think i have enough reference and stuff but i. i liked drawing you. is that weird?  
god that’s probably weird  
anyway um  
d’you... want to keep doing this, like the drawings and photos and stuff, next semester? 

“Who is it?” Eren asked with the worst shit-eating grin they’d ever seen on him, and Armin certainly wasn’t far off.

“Nobody,” Mikasa snapped, jamming their phone back in their pocket. “Keep packing, we’re leaving tomorrow morning.”

“Can we take the giant elephant with us?” Eren asked in between stifling laughs, and barely dodged the pillow Mikasa threw at his head.

\---

**To: Jean [animator]  
** At: 8:04am  
_I’d like that._

\---

Mikasa didn’t mind him like this, a background presence as they went about their days back home, the sporadic text message asking what they were up to, or if they’d taken any pictures of the snowfall. At times they would answer right away; at times they’d wait a little longer, until there was no one to ask who they were talking to. They filled time with photos, housework, days with Eren at the little shops and the arcade in their hometown, evenings with Armin and fleece blankets and bad horror movies. Nights with both of them, and nights with neither. Mikasa never asked what they were doing, and sometimes they didn’t want to know. It was easier to distract themselves those nights, commiserating with Levi over the phone before bed.

Aunt Carla would ask about the friends they’d made, as if they were still in high school, and about Armin. Uncle Grisha would flip through their photos and visit them in the corner of the basement that they’d fashioned into a makeshift darkroom, and remind them to straighten their back every few hours. “Listen to your body,” he would tell them, as if they were still new to binding, but they supposed a doctor’s worries would always be a doctor’s worries. And a projected father’s, too, but the thought of that alone made their skin crawl more than they liked it to.

But Jean was a break from the monotony, a sort of glimpse of what they would come back to, what was going on outside of them. The _Merry Christmas_ and _Happy New Year_ texts while they were tucked away in a corner of Levi’s apartment, the simple romanized Japanese sentences he’d shoot their way when they asked if he’d been practicing, and the fumbling apologies when they sent back gentle corrections. But they couldn’t say he wasn’t doing well, and they couldn’t squash the course of adrenaline through their blood when he called one night the week before classes started again and said, “I know this is weird, but I just. Wanted to hear you. Are you busy?”

Mikasa remembered swallowing hard, clenching and unclenching their fist, and toeing their bedroom door shut when they said, “No.” And then cursed the quaver in their voice, and hoped he hadn’t heard over the flimsy connection. Or that maybe he’d drowned it out with a sigh of relief that they felt in the tips of their fingers.

They couldn’t deny the fact that the two of them spoke for hours, either, or that they were smiling when they saw him on the residence campus after they’d moved back into the dorms. Or that they were smiling, again, when he stepped into Levi’s class five minutes early. They would, to other people. But not to themselves, and not to him. Not what they tried too hard to make theirs.

“Break was all right?” he asked before Levi strode in with his jeans and his tea, and when Mikasa nodded, they hoped he’d chalk up the heat on their cheeks to the cold weather, logic be damned.

And feelings be damned, too. Especially when they could have sworn, even from the front of the room that Jean’s eyes lit up when Levi used their upcoming birthday as an example sentence.

\---

“Do you like birthdays, Mikasa?” Jean asked them as they sat huddled on top of one of the picnic tables on the residence campus. Him with the sketchbook, them with the camera, as they did. Maybe it was out of the blue, maybe it wasn’t--he’d mentioned how conversations were always like scripts to him, how he had to practice and pretend he’d always know what the other person was going to say. Like everything about him was about intentions and precautions and the best of everything.

Mikasa ignored the swell in their chest at the sound of their name; they couldn’t even bring themselves to hate the fact that it was happening more often now, or that every time it did they couldn’t help but remember the sound of his laugh. “Why do you ask?”

Jean shrugged, setting his sketchbook aside and reaching to square their shoulders and readjust the drape of their arms over their knees. They tried to ignore that, too, how each touch was careful and felt like the first, from the coil of his hands to the subtle catch of their lip between their teeth to the almost hope that his fingers might slip between their own, just for a second. “Well, whenever someone mentions yours--like Levi, in class--you get this weird look on your face. So I just thought...”

It was easier to stay still now, to resist the urge to fall into more comfortable poses while they spoke. “I just don’t like to make a big deal of it, is all.” It was easier that way, they wanted to say. It was easier when fewer people knew, when they didn’t have to bother with greetings and formalities from people they barely spoke to. They could keep it to a handful of people, a simple dinner with Eren’s family, or with Eren and Armin. Or even alone--they’d had a few like that, with wrapped trinkets beside them in the middle of the night while they read and watched the snow fall.

It was easier to tell who mattered that way, they wanted to say, but they didn’t have words that wouldn’t hurt him. They didn’t have words to tell him that he was toeing the line between mattering and not mattering, that they didn’t have reason to place him on either side of it. That maybe it wouldn’t be so hard, if he kept brushing the line of their jaw, if he could carry them home again.

“Whatever mashes your potatoes,” Jean said with a smile and a shrug, and the sudden remembrance of the gentle press of his back against their chest made their stomach drop and their muscles tighten. “Relax, Mikasa,” he added. “You’re getting all tense again.”

Mikasa’s shoulders slumped, and they squeezed their eyes shut to will away the flickering thought of what he might feel like sleeping next to them. If the press would be the same. “Right. Tense. Sorry.”

“You don’t let up,” he murmured, and he wasn’t wrong. Even Levi had pointed out how skittish they were around his office, sometimes making too few or too many copies of worksheets. _Just focus, would you?_ , he’d said during a lull in the day, poring over the electric kettle in the corner of his office. _You’re already on edge as it is._ And they’d already learned the hard way that even when they thought Levi was wrong, he was usually right.

But they tried. For their own sake, and maybe even for Levi’s. And for the most part, they succeeded, trampling the occasional catch of Jean’s eye with a wave of disgust at the students who were still too smug for their own good, or with approaching deadlines for portfolios and parts of their degree project. Not that things were easier when, on the evening of their twenty-first birthday, they found Jean standing just outside their dorm room with nothing but a small paper bag in hand. 

“Jean...?” Mikasa cocked their head with their hand still curled around the doorknob, one eyebrow raised. Part of them was still caught in the haze of freshening up and time winding down. “What are you doing here?”

Jean’s eyes widened once he saw them, and his mouth threatened to fall open, but he shook his head quickly and tore his gaze away, coughing and rubbing his arm before he said, “Sorry. I, uh, shouldn’t have stared.”

Mikasa looked down, too, to push up the sleeves of their sweater, tug at the hem of their skirt and pick at their tights. “It’s because I’m not wearing the hat, isn’t it,” they tried to joke, carding their fingers through their hair and offering a weak smile. They stopped Jean when he tried to scramble for a coherent answer. “I know. It’s the clothes. Don’t worry about it. To be honest, I thought you might... I don’t know. Make a joke about them.” They hesitated before pointing to the pattern at the tops of their thighs, a cartoonish cat head on either one.

“Of course not,” Jean replied a little too fast, color spreading across the bridge of his nose as he pressed his lips together. “You look...” He cleared his throat. “You look nice. Not that you don’t look nice _all_ the time, I mean, of course you do, even if you were wearing, I dunno, what you usually wear, or like, a giant sweater with a dog on it or something...”

It took Mikasa a moment to realize they were smiling, and they sighed and pressed a hand to their stomach to calm themselves. “You never answered my question,” they pointed out.

Snapping to attention, Jean stood stiff before holding out the bag to her. “Happy birthday,” he blurted out, and Mikasa couldn’t tell if there was more color in his cheeks now, or if perhaps they were hoping there would be. With a nod and a smile they were more conscious of, they picked at the tissue paper, brushing against a sealed card before they pulled out a plastic container. A single gourmet cupcake sat inside, wrapped in decorative foil and topped with a swirl of white frosting and a scatter of heart-shaped sprinkles. Another container sat beside it in the bag, filled with sliced strawberries. They looked at him with questions in their eyes and dead words on their lips, and they couldn’t do much more than open and close their mouth several times.

“What’s this for?” they finally managed to say as they leaned against the doorway.

“It’s not much,” he started, looking everywhere but at them, “And I know you said one time that you’re not really big on sweets. So you can even share it with Armin and your brother if you want--you said you were going out to dinner with them tonight, right? That’s, uh, that’s why I got the strawberries too, in case you wanted to share, or in case you didn’t like the cupcake--” He stopped himself then, like he was trying to collect his thoughts again, remember what he had rehearsed on his own. “I thought. I thought, since it’s a special day for you, you might make an exception.” He smiled then, rubbing the back of his neck. “You look good with exceptions. But you...” His hand stopped moving, and he quirked his probably-still-chapped lips. “You’re comfortable wearing it, right?”

Mikasa paused, lips barely parting to match his, and this time they could feel their face heat up when they answered. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“Sorry, I--I didn’t mean it like that, I was just making sure--”

“Jean.” Mikasa leaned back to put the bag aside before they took a step into the hallway, with the music still blaring from inside their room, and Jean took one step back to match them. “I get it. Don’t worry.” They took another step forward, and Jean took another step back, and they had to suppress another smile when they told him not to move. And maybe they did hesitate, but they hoped Jean wouldn’t notice when they reached out to wrap their arms around his middle. If they remembered what it was like to be this close to him before, they wouldn’t mind.

They thought, in the past, that hugging was the sort of thing they would have to get used to, maybe even force themselves through, if it wasn’t Eren or Armin. But it felt natural like this. Enough. Right, while they stood in fuzzy slippers with their favorite song in the background, while they rested their chin on Jean’s shoulder and whispered _thank you_ s into his ear, until they felt the tension leave him. And especially right when they finally felt his arms around them, too--just above their waist, too respectful. Maybe more of these would be just as right, if he wanted them.

Mikasa pulled back the way they might have expected someone to pull away from a kiss, or come down from a high. Getting bearings, blinking back to reality. They didn’t have to doubt the color in Jean’s cheeks this time, or if he’d practiced for that. When they finally found the words to speak again, they said, dumbly and after an apology, “I’ll see you on Monday.”

Jean stammered, “IuhIhavetogo,” and he was halfway down the hall before he had the sense to turn around and wave. Maybe he’d seen the color in Mikasa’s face, too. Maybe the feeling, the novelty of it, would stick with him, too. They let themselves hope so, at least until he disappeared around the corner and into the elevator. And then they stepped back into their room, with the door closed and still in their slippers, and slid to the floor with a groan.

\---

Before Mikasa left for dinner that night, they dipped a finger into the cupcake frosting to taste. It wasn’t too sweet.


	3. SPRING III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for 300 hits ;/////;! It was a nice surprise to come home to today. 
> 
> Also, I don't think I mentioned this before, but I have a [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/omnistruck) where you can follow me and talk about fic and stuff c: which is super fun.
> 
> In any case, I really appreciate all your support ;u; thank you so much, and I hope you enjoy this installment!

**Jean**

“I like them, Marco. I like them so much it makes me _mad_ ,” Jean said with a sigh. He figured people were supposed to do that when they had feelings like his—he just thought they’d have a goofy smile on their faces instead of clenched fists jammed in their laps. Like things were supposed to come easy, floating, with a calm mind, instead of with his heart beating so fast under his skin that he wouldn’t have been surprised if Marco could hear it, too.

But Marco only stared with a corn chip halfway to his mouth and marks from the carpet stamped into his thighs. “Like angry mad, or like crazy mad?”

“Yes.”

They were sitting on the floor of Marco’s bedroom, the way they usually did during spring break, with a bowl of sweets and a few bags of chips between them, cups of soda at their sides, and music from their school days pulsing from the speakers on the desk. Somehow it was easier like this, seeing Marco as a real person, breathing and smiling and crinkling bags as he opened them, instead of as a face on a screen. For a while, during the first couple of months apart, Jean thought they could have replaced the distance with more honesty, more self-expression. Or more people, all things considered. But maybe people were right when they said you never forget your first love, especially when he calls you at three in the morning and tells you in a groggy slur that you’re still his best friend, that he still needs you in his life somehow, in spite of high school, in spite of the breakup, in spite of everything. 

And nothing, not even the comfortable silence of their video calls, could replace the feeling of a hand on his shoulder and the firm but friendly knock of Marco’s knuckles against his temple, anyway. The way he was now as he leaned forward, and Jean’s attention snapped back to him.

“They asked you to carry them home,” Marco said.

“That doesn’t really mean anything,” Jean pointed out, reaching a hand into the bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. “Anyone could ask anyone to carry them, and it’d just be an act of kindness.”

Marco gave him a stone stare and folded his arms. “They asked you to do it while they were half-asleep. You know what they say about half-asleep people in the middle of the night.” He grinned. “The same thing they say about people who’ve had too much to drink. Truth in wine and all that.”

“I’m not surprised,” Jean said with a snort, and maybe Marco would indulge him with a distraction, at least enough to quell his stomach. “You sound drunk when you’re about to pass out. Or high. Maybe both.”

“ _I_ sound drunk,” Marco corrected him with a laugh and a wrinkle of the nose. “You sound high. You’re the only person I know who would ask if grass cries when you step on it.”

“Only with bare feet,” Jean pointed out.

“Because what if your feet stink and they don’t like it?” they said in unison, and Marco rolled his eyes and sat back. It was easier, taking the weight off with stupid shit.

“Tell me more about Mikasa,” he said, and the “s” caught between his tongue and his teeth, the way Jean always remembered it. He spoke Spanish like that too with his mother—heavily, nothing like the metallic ring of their high-school teacher’s voice. “Tell me about their photos.”

Jean sat up a little straighter, and he could practically feel the color spill onto his cheeks when he rummaged through his bag and pulled one out—a picture of the two of them, cheeks pressed together under the sunlight with modest smiles and uneven hats. He handed it over without a word, eyes cast out the window at the setting sun while Marco turned the photo over and over in his hands. He was smiling warmly, the tips of his ears bright red, when Jean turned back to look at him, and he realized that Marco was waiting for him to speak. “It’s just a Polaroid,” he mumbled. “It was almost empty, so we took some photos before break. I don’t think Mikasa trusts me with their other cameras yet. Probably for good reason. I’d probably break it or something.”

Marco only tilted his head to the side, fingers carding through his hair as he read the photo’s caption aloud. “And they have a photo, too.” 

Of course he knew things like this without asking.

Jean nodded, tucking his knees under his chin, and he hoped that deep breaths would push the adrenaline from his stomach. For a moment he wondered if Mikasa had pinned the photo somewhere in their room, or clipped it on the clothesline above their computer—he’d seen it once or twice when he stopped by with afternoon coffee or to pick them up for one of their art sessions. The thought of them turning the photo between their fingers, reading the message he’d scrawled on the back and hoped they could decipher, made him curl up a little more tightly. Like he thought—wished—he could make himself smaller.

“Did you feel like this?” he asked with his fingers laced across his knees. “With us.”

“Feel like what?” Marco said, still smiling, eyes still half-lidded when he handed the photo back and made for a bag of Skittles.

Jean spared another glance at the photo before he put it aside. “Like you weren’t just making discoveries with someone, like you weren’t just thinking too hard about how you felt and what to do. Like everything just came naturally, and it wasn’t so hard to hide things.”

“Did I love you, you mean.” It was the quietest Marco had spoken all afternoon, even if he looked like he was about to pelt Jean with a few pieces of candy. “Were you home to me. Was I comfortable with you.” He fell silent for a moment, the way he did when he was overthinking how to answer a question or trying to recede into himself, as if they were fourteen and Jean had made the stupid mistake of pointing out how thick his glasses were. “Of course,” he said with a sigh of his own, slow and thoughtful where Jean’s had been too quick, too frustrated. “Still do. Still are. Still am. Just different now, isn’t it.”

Jean wrapped his arms around himself and felt his stomach drop, and maybe he shouldn’t have brought it up. Maybe it was better after all, to think about friendships instead of ex-romances, why they stay instead of why they changed, or stopped altogether. “’S why we let go, huh.”

This time Marco actually did pelt a Skittle at him, and Jean wrinkled his nose as he caught it and popped it into his mouth. “That’s a waste of candy, y’know.”

“Green apple is a waste of confectionery,” Marco shot back, “like a bug at the bottom of your milkshake.” But when he dropped a handful of them into Jean’s open palm, he added, “It’s why I’m happy to see you feel this way about someone, stupid. It’s nice to have different homes in different people.”

Jean wished the night, the break, and each conversation, hadn’t passed by so quickly; he couldn’t help but want to go back and stare up at Marco’s ceiling, talking about cupcakes and strawberries and postures while Marco flipped through his sketchbook and probably tried not to smile. “Just references, huh?” Jean could already hear him say, even after he’d pulled into the parking lot of the residence campus and his mother had kissed him goodbye. (Of course they weren’t just references; he and Mikasa had already agreed on that. They liked being muses and artists in their own right.)

And he wished it wasn’t so easy to remember, as he sat in the first classes after break and watched Levi twirl a dry-erase marker between his fingers and rattle off examples of the verb forms they were learning that week, just why it would be better to pretend he didn’t feel this way— _any_ way— at all. Not that he thought Levi would turn into some protective father figure, or a gatekeeper—he’d probably have to get in line, considering the sharp glint in Mikasa’s eye when they struck down the smoother-talking boys with just a few words. They could handle themselves, and Levi probably knew that better than anyone else in the room. But there at least had to be some policy against dating a teaching assistant, didn’t there? To preserve “academic integrity,” or something, even if “academic integrity” was never really a question between them when they caught his eye and held his gaze just before class ended.

Maybe part of him wished that Mikasa wouldn’t look at him, talk to him, the way they did before and after class and that week’s oral group meeting—with hints of sparkles in their eyes and smiles on their lips, a silent _welcome back_. But the wish was a little easier to squash when he stopped by their room that weekend for another art session, and when he saw Armin wave from his place on Mikasa’s bed, he couldn’t help but rock back on his heels and smile. Because maybe Mikasa found different homes in different people, too—at least in themselves and in Armin, and their brother, too. He couldn’t guarantee that they could find one in him, too; but for now, as he stepped into their room and cast a glance at the Polaroid clipped above their laptop, maybe a door and a couple of windows could suffice.

\---

“We should switch,” Mikasa said with a thoughtful quirk of the lips, perched at the foot of their bed in their pajamas while Jean sketched their posture from the floor. They’d already exchanged formalities and stories of spring break over a few store-bought cookies that settled a little too heavily in Jean’s stomach. They didn’t work in here often—Mikasa told him once that they preferred working outside, “where real life was,”—but he always considered it some sort of privilege when they would let him in. There was something quiet about the place, or personal, with a half-made bed, photographs pinned and clipped in an organized clutter by their desk, the gentle breath of the sleep mode light at the edge of their laptop, and the almost obscene glint of the micro-fridge, the cleanest thing in the room. Like some combination of an office and a sanctuary, instead of some stale place to crash in the middle of the night. Like real life was here, too, right under their noses.

“What do you mean, Mikaman?” he asked without looking up from his drawing. Sometimes the nickname slipped out without him meaning to say it; the first time he did, he’d happened to see them coming back from the darkroom on campus—“Hey, Mikaman, done for the day?”—and they’d paused and looked down at their boots, like they were scrambling for something to say. He never pegged them as the type to do that, fumble with words the way he did, not when they could fold their arms and reject other students’ awkward attempts at being suave. Maybe, he thought, they were used to facades of kindness instead of the real thing. Touches of the hand and terms of endearment from someone who really meant it.

“I mean,” they said, as if they were deliberating on every word, “that we should switch styles. I’ll try to draw, and you try photography.” They shrugged, and Jean noticed that they wiggled their toes in their socks before they slid off the bed; he couldn’t help but smile, though he bit his lip to try and hide it. “If we’re making something therapeutic of this, instead of academic, then we might as well switch things up sometimes. It’s why you’ve stopped trying to speak Japanese in front of me, right?”

Jean felt the color rise to his cheeks, and his brows bunched at the middle. “What are you—I didn’t—”

“Because class time is class time,” Mikasa went on, sliding to the floor and crawling next to him, “and our time is our time.” Their shoulder pressed against his as they peered down at his sketch, and if he turned enough and mustered up the courage he could tuck their hair behind their ear. _Their_ time. They’d never called it _their_ time before, or any kind of time—it was just something they did, at times for school and at times to unwind. Jean supposed he was never fully aware of how alone they were, or how together; if he was, it had worn off long ago, and he liked it that way. Seeing Mikasa as they were, instead of a subject, someone or something to put on a pedestal and possess in his own context, even though they did the same to him.

“May I?” they asked just above a whisper, and he coaxed the pencil between their fingers and the sketchbook into their lap, painfully aware of how long he’d been holding his breath.

The first thing Jean noticed, after Mikasa turned the page and they were sitting a reasonable distance apart, was that Mikasa’s hands were shaking. Just barely, but it was still there, while the tip of their tongue poked out of the corner of their lips and the spiral binding dug into their curled fingers. As if they had something to prove to him, or perhaps to themselves. He might have told them to relax if it didn’t look like they were already trying to, and it was at least a half-hour before they put the sketchbook down and pushed it in his direction. “I tried,” they said as they got to their feet and reached for their camera bag, “And you can’t criticize me for that.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Jean murmured, unsure of whether he could say that it could be better or worse. It wasn’t as though he could fault them for things they didn’t master, or know in the first place. Nobody would ever learn that way—nobody would _want_ to learn that way.

“Between the three of us, that’s the best any of us can do,” Mikasa told him, unzipping the bag and examining the camera from all angles. Their lips were pressed together too tightly, and Jean had to fight the urge to readjust the tank top strap slipping down their shoulder, or to count the stars on their pajama shorts. He got to twelve before Mikasa spoke up again, and he tore his eyes away. “Eren and Armin and me, I mean. Eren’s a glassmaker, Armin does architecture. I’m the closest any of us gets to people.”

“Ironically,” Jean said, half-teasing, and Mikasa looked up and smiled.

If there were more to them than a door and a couple of windows, Jean didn’t take the time to notice, and didn’t think he wanted to. Not when he cradled Mikasa’s camera in his hands, terrified of breaking it; not when they showed him how the camera worked and allowed him to take a few photos; not when they told him he could be a natural with a little more time and practice, and covered his hands with their own as they showed him how to hold the camera more properly. If there were a house to them, he didn’t mind taking the time to build it with them, even after they exchanged good nights and less awkward hugs, and then hellos again on the quad or in Levi’s classroom. Or when one of them stopped by the other’s room and found comfort in small talk, not-so-small talk, and the sometimes silence of a single room.

It was easier that way, to make a world that was theirs and to make a world that they lived in, two separate domains, two separate comforts. Where he didn’t have to try to play up to them, and maybe vice versa. Where they were people who drew on the sleeves of their coffee cups to pass the time, who rested their chins in their hands in impromptu staring contests and didn’t care who won. Who went off script, and didn’t tell Marco about it to spare themselves the _I told you so_ s.

“So how’d you do it?” hissed the boy who sat next to Jean while Levi was handing back their latest tests at the end of March. All Jean knew was that his name was Samuel, and that he spoke to show off instead of to learn. “How’d you snag her?”

Too tired to clarify anything, Jean clenched his fists under the table and stared down at the bright red 100 and _Well done!_ written in Mikasa’s familiar half-bubbly penmanship. “Maybe I never thought of them as someone to be snagged.”

\---

And then _his_ birthday happened, came around the corner sooner than he expected it to. He crossed off the date on his calendar, went to his classes, rested his chin in his hands and pretended it was like any other day. He didn’t really have a choice—his mother had called him just a couple of days before about some last-minute shifts she’d been penciled in for, though she still made a point to call him after class. But he couldn’t help but smile to himself when, as his classmates were packing up and Levi was reminding them about their assignments, Mikasa leaned to catch his eye and mouthed _Happy Birthday_. He replied with a silent _thank you_ , pressing a hand to his stomach and wondering if at some point they’d had a change of heart.

So this was twenty-one. Class in the background and life going on, and the butterflies under his skin hinged on a half-smile. And no alcohol to speak of, despite an invitation from some other animation majors to the local bar. People who’d guided him and fumbled with him through the years, and now probably just wanted to see him dance on a table, if he was as much of a lightweight as they always said he was. Because he needed to get out more often, they said. Because it must get lonely being in a room all by himself. Because he spent too much time around the same people and with graphite all over his hands. They might not have said it if it took _them_ weeks to say hello and seconds to say goodbye. If sometimes it was easier to make a few strokes than it was to make a sentence.

Well, what was there to do? Hang around the liberal arts college campus for no reason, or trudge back to the dorms (again) and hole up with instant mac and cheese (again) and marathon a television show (again)? Or call Marco (again)?

He considered his options and made for the usual.

Again.

Because if his birthday was meant to be like every day, he might as well make it so.

Which was how he found himself, at half-past nine, tucked into his desk chair and trading memories he and Marco probably should have forgotten, or wished they had, when he heard a knock at the door. Marco’s lips quirked on the computer screen, and Jean held up a hand as he slid out of his chair and made for the door.

And there was Mikasa, standing on the sides of their feet in the hallway, with a black plastic bag hanging from their fingers and permission in their eyes. “I brought a six-pack,” was all they said.

And Jean said, after stumbling over too many words, “Come in.”

He didn’t even have to look at the computer screen to know what kind of grin had spread across Marco’s face, and Jean introduced them under his breath while Mikasa stepped out of their sneakers and sat down on their knees, still clutching the plastic bag. “We went to high school together,” he explained.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Marco said, eyebrows raised and chin in his hands, and Jean already knew that no amount of trying to talk over him would make Marco stop, or drain the blush on his face. He didn’t know if people ever really did want the earth to swallow them whole, but for a fleeting moment, he thought he actually might have. “But I’ll let you two go, yeah? Jean deserves some more fun on his birthday.” Without another word, he waved, and there was a click, and the two of them were left staring at Jean’s computer screen, a photo Mikasa had taken of the waterfront just before spring break.

Jesus. He’d never hear the end of that tomorrow.

When Jean turned back to look at Mikasa, they were looking down at their knees, fingers tangled in the ends of their hair. “I know you said he joked around sometimes,” they said, “but is he always like that?”

“Only when he’s trying to get my goat about something,” he said with as nonchalant a shrug as he could manage, and even that was a little too close to the truth. 

To distract himself he opened a radio application on his computer, while Mikasa fiddled with a bottle opener. Glass clinked and air hissed amid the flow of classic rock, and when Jean invited them to sit farther away from the door, they were already holding out a bottle to him. “It’s just from the liquor store a couple of blocks away,” Mikasa said as he took it and waited for them to open their own, “but I don’t know anyone who drinks beer for the taste.”

“My dad used to,” Jean replied with a half-smile, tapping the neck of his bottle to the neck of Mikasa’s, and he choked when the first swig of the drink settled on his tongue and the back of his throat. He’d always heard, here and there, that the first taste of alcohol was the worst; now he wanted to kick himself for not believing it. “ _Shit_ ,” he sputtered. “Tastes like fucking pine needles and citrus.”

“Happy twenty-first,” Mikasa said with a snort. They practically up-ended the bottle when they took a drink of their own, only wrinkling their nose when they swallowed. Still an acquired taste for them, too, it seemed. Or maybe it was the fact that it was so cheap; they’d mentioned something about fruit and cocktails when they told him about their birthday dinner.

They talked in between more careful sips, first about school, and as his limbs loosened and his body warmed, so too did the conversation. If he looked close enough he thought he could see the occasional drop of beer clinging to the corner of Mikasa’s lips, but the growing haze and the warmth under his skin in his mind kept him, and perhaps Mikasa too, from caring too much. He wasn’t really sure what held his gaze more—how their eyes shut tight when they tipped the bottle back, how their throat dithered with each gulp, or the sigh and the cough that tumbled from their lips when they opened their eyes again. Like this was how they were supposed to be drinking, or living, habits for them to get used to. Have to get used to. Wasn’t this how they were meant to be thought of? 

Once they’d downed the second set of bottles and Mikasa cracked open the third, he leaned back against the side of his bed, with the heat crawling up his neck and across his face. He said, or thought he said, “You’re like a natural already. It’s been what. Two months?” He hiccuped, and his voice cracked when he laughed. “God, how often to you drink this shit?”

Mikasa sighed, eyelids drooping, with the rim of the bottle pressed against their lips. “I don’t—I don’t all the time,” they mumbled, and they sounded half-asleep, like they had in the animation lab. “It helps me forget some things sometimes. Makes it easier to... to be alone, sometimes.” They fell silent after that, put the bottle aside and tucked their knees under their chin, and Jean felt his stomach drop.

“I thought you had Armin,” he offered, after an uncomfortable cough. “You said he was your partner. And there’s Eren, and Levi, and—”

But Mikasa was shrugging and shaking their head. “Levi has his older friends. _Academics_ ,” they added with a roll of the eyes. “Not the type of people I’d be around unless I have to. When I see him, it’s class this, and class that, or we just watch movies and drink and talk about the shit things in our lives.” They laughed under their breath, like they couldn’t even believe themselves. “He gave me my first drink, you know. When I was nineteen. He said if I was going to do it, he might as well let me, and control it himself.” They paused, tapping the bottle against their lips. “And Armin and Eren... they’ve been a lot of things for me, both of them, but they have each other too. In that way that I can’t really. Match. Or have a place.”

“Romantically,” Jean murmured, and Mikasa only hummed and nodded with another swig of beer. They might have been holding back a tear; he didn’t notice, or at least pretended not to.

“Do you have that kind of place?”

For a moment, Jean went rigid, and he pressed his hand against the cold tile of the floor. “I did. Once.”

“Marco?” they asked, and Jean couldn’t quite tell if the softness of their voice betrayed curiosity, or maybe hopelessness. 

He wished it was the first, and nodded. “That obvious, huh?” His head tipped back, pressed against the side of his mattress as he blinked up at the ceiling. “Kinda scary when you’re fifteen and you start thinking maybe you like boys the same way you like girls. Then when you’re eighteen and you break up because you want different things. You want distant things. And it’s funny because you thought that was why twenty-somethings broke up. Not people ready to go to college. Not you.” The rest hung heavy in his mind, had for a while—another drink or two, and he might have said it aloud. 

_And then when you’re twenty-one and start to think it’s more complex than that, you remember it’s never just two slots, boys and/or girls. When you’re twenty-one and the person sitting across from you isn’t a girl, isn’t a boy, but you get the same fucking feeling in your chest, the feeling that you like them, you love them. And you don’t know what it says about you anymore. You don’t know what to think about you anymore. Maybe you never knew yourself at all. Because people fall faster than this, they build lives together faster than this, and the whole room still beats like a Goddamn heart when all you want to do is lean in close and breathe what they breathe, put your hands on their hands, put your mouth on their mouth. When you think before was too fast, and this is too slow, or is this just as fast? Is it only by comparison? Was that right? Is this right? Is this right?_

“Did you love him?” Mikasa asked; Jean could hear them shifting, maybe closer, maybe farther away.

He managed a smile, bit his lip, and squinted to fight the lump in his throat. “Yeah,” he said, hoarsely. “Yeah, I did.”

“Do you ever want it back? The feeling.” A gulp, and then the hollow thud of glass against tile. More shifting. He started to think he was imagining it.

“With the right person,” he ventured to say against the pulse of electric guitar in the background, draining his bottle and putting it aside as his eyes fell shut. “With someone who really… cares about me. My wellbeing. Calls me out on my shit and helps me be better. For them. For me. Someone I can do that for, too.”

Mikasa hummed—“I want that, too”—and when Jean opened his eyes and looked down, he saw them kneeling in front of him, with half-lidded eyes, looking down at his lips. Maybe they were breathing what he was breathing. Maybe they didn’t know themselves, either. But they looked up at him, back down at his lips, edged closer until they had a hand against his cheek and their noses were just barely brushing. With the buzz under his skin and his heart beating loud, louder, in his ears; he wondered if they could hear it, or if they were too wrapped up in this to know.

“I want that, too,” they said again, before they kissed him, slow and experimental and mouths almost closed. They held him there, and he gasped sharply, through his nose, and neither of them moved until Mikasa pulled back and opened their eyes. “Did you… feel anything?”

Jean swallowed hard, fingers curling against their arms; their beanie was lopsided atop their head, and he half-squashed the urge to pluck it off and fling it across the room. “Did you?” he managed instead.

They still didn’t move. “Do you want to try again, just to see?”

He nodded, almost dumbly, and this time he did fling their hat to the floor, tangled his fingers in their hair, and leaned in to kiss them again. A sigh caught in his throat, and they crawled into his lap, and they were kissing him, really kissing him, with their heels digging into the small of his back and teeth catching his bottom lip. And maybe this was home, in spite of the bitter taste of beer. Maybe it was pulling and pulling even when they were too close already; pulses too fast for the tempo in the background; hands on his neck and at their waist, curled against clothing; the beats of hesitation, when their lips only brushed, before he sought the comfort of their open mouth. Again, and again, and again.

Mikasa’s palms slid down his chest, fingers catching on the collar of his shirt, when they both allowed themselves to break the kiss. “Still nothing,” they breathed.

Even with how close they were—or maybe because of it—Jean couldn’t tell if this was a fluke. Or an accident. Or if Mikasa was weirdly indulging him, or themselves, in some way. “Yeah,” he said, tongue heavy with intoxication and a lie he already wished he could take back, or didn’t. “Still nothing.”

\---

He was sober. And stupid. And maybe saying all that stuff aloud would have been just as stupid a decision as kissing them seemed to have been.

Because in the days that had passed since his birthday, they had done little more than exchange hellos in the cafeteria and on the campus of the liberal arts college, drink coffee in silence with lowered gazes, engage in required conversations for grades and for pay. More often it was Mikasa who would pack their things faster, leave rooms and hallways without a backward glance, give one-word answers in between sips of their drink. No talks in the animation lab or the darkroom, no parallels of their barely-half-finished degree projects, no sketches in his room, no photos in theirs. Jean didn’t know if he was supposed to adapt to that, or confront them, but he learned to fill the silence with doodles, seating himself out of their line of vision and only just in time when he could, until a Thursday three weeks into April when they asked to speak with him about the final paper and exam after their oral group meeting.

“You don’t want to talk about the final, do you,” he said as they were righting stacks of paper to pack away, once the other students had cleared out.

“Not unless you actually have questions about it,” Mikasa answered, and Jean folded his arms and shook his head.

“Look,” he began in between breaths, with clenched fists. He was actually staring at them now, at how they avoided looking at him, how their teeth sank into their lip. “If this is about what happened on my birthday, I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what he was apologizing for; for the awkwardness? For drinking? For kissing them at all? “I shouldn’t have done it, not when you’re… There’s probably some policy, and… We can forget it happened, okay. I just want to go back to before. I just want to be your friend again.”

Mikasa went rigid before they got to their feet, and for a second he thought he might have said something wrong. He wouldn’t have been surprised. “Right. Friends.” And then, as an afterthought that Jean wasn’t sure was a joke, “Was it really that awful?”

“No!” Maybe he’d answered a little too quickly, but he touched his fingers to his lips and tried to reach for the memory of what theirs had felt like. “No. It wasn’t awful. It was... nice.”

“Right,” Mikasa said with a sigh, slinging their bag over their shoulder and brushing past him, leaving him alone in the classroom. “Nice.”

\---

“Jean, you _fucking_ idiot.”

Tell him something he didn’t already know. But what was he supposed to do? Take a plunge and risk falling flat on his face?

“Yes.”

Bring up the fact that they’d kissed two weeks ago and, oh, by the way, he had a _raging crush_ on them?

“ _Yes_ , Jean.” Marco pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose on Jean’s computer screen, bunched between animation software and tracks of music, and somehow his stare was more piercing that way. “That’s _exactly_ what you were supposed to do.”

Jean gripped his tablet pen too tightly before setting it down, keeping an eye on it the whole time. “I can’t do that,” he admitted. And he couldn’t. It was too soon, and finals were in two weeks, and he’d probably go home for the summer not knowing if the two of them were even on the same page. If friends was what they wanted, if it was enough for him. Besides, wasn’t it the nice thing to do? To hold back, keep away from the pressure. Didn’t Mikasa have enough already?

“Listen to me, Jean,” Marco began, and it took everything in him to look back up at the computer screen and push his work to the back, in spite of deadlines. “Let me ask you something.”

“What.”

“Are you going to regret not telling them how you _actually_ feel once summer comes?”

Jean sat back in his chair, tucked his knees toward his stomach. Of course he would. That’s what everybody says—you regret not doing things more than you regret doing them. “You mean it wouldn’t be better to just… give it time? Move on from it or come to some conclusion, or something?”

Marco rested his chin in his hand. “Say you did that. What if they had feelings for you? What if they still do? What are they supposed to think?”

“I don’t—” If he pressed the heels of his palms to his eyes he could, at least for a second here and there, block out the throbbing in his temple. “I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell they’re thinking.”

Marco was probably waiting for him to look up again, because when he did, Marco flung a pita chip at the screen. “That’s all the more reason to talk to them.” He rolled his eyes. “God, I swear, sometimes you haven’t changed a bit since graduation.”

And maybe that was it. Maybe he hadn’t really changed, only convinced himself he had, somehow. With drawings and drinks and false improv that passed as natural conversation. It couldn’t be a trap, could it? He couldn’t do that again, could he? Keep running away under the guise of courtesy and only taking up as much space as he thought he was allowed? Keep doing exactly what he knew Mikasa did, with his own twisted justification?

 _It makes it easier to be alone sometimes._ They’d said that with the bottle to their lips.

He’d made them be alone sometimes. Hadn’t he.

For the first time in weeks, Jean reached into his desk drawer and pulled out the Polaroid photo. He studied it as best as he could, and sighed. Of course he’d never capture the same angles and tones as Mikasa, but this was different. He was different. This was them, living and breathing and ignorant, writing _Be brave always_ on the backs of pictures like they were sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. And this was him, stupidly wishing he could take everything back and do it the right way. If there was a right way.

“I’ll do it,” he said after a pause; his head was still throbbing, and his hands were starting to shake, and he saved and quit his progress in the meantime. “It’s all I can do, anyway.”

“ _Finally_ ,” said Marco, though an affectionate smile graced his face. “I can’t stand you agonizing like this.”

Jean waited until the night before they were supposed to move off the residence campus. To be fair, he had to spend the week psyching himself up, finishing term projects, creating progress reports and process papers and studying for Levi. For them, for himself. But by now he’d crossed the line into excuses, and he couldn’t take confronting himself anymore.

He ran. Across the campus, with a studded heartbeat, and clammy palms that he kept wiping against his jeans, even as he tapped into their dorm building and opted for the stairs. Because elevators meant standing still, and standing still meant thinking too much, turning around, running away, and he had to do it. He had to do it. None of this was easy, he told himself as he made down their hallway. None of this was floating or calm, and he’d probably duped himself with books and the farce of an outside perspective this whole time.

Mikasa was probably packing; there was shuffling, a soft voice, the occasional bump against furniture and the more frequent sound of a zipper. And him, ticking back and forth in his mind. Had to do this. Couldn’t do this. Had to do this. Couldn’t do this. Branching out. Stop thinking. Start talking. Say something. _Say it._

He raised his knuckle to the door and knocked more than he meant to, with a shaky hand and the rush of blood to every conceivable part of him. 

“What is it, Armin?” He could hear them, weary and muffled, on the other side. “I helped you guys pack as much as I could, and Levi and I are talking about Utrecht, and—”

And then the door opened, and Mikasa was standing there, sporting wrinkled pajamas, dark circles, and bloodshot eyes, with the phone pressed to their ear.

He took a breath. “Can we talk?” he asked.

And Mikasa paused, tilted the receiver to their mouth, and said, “Can I call you back?”


End file.
